Replacing Twitter

Brent Simmons recently wrote about Twitter’s decision to greatly reduce third-party access to Twitter over time.

Were I a Twitter client developer, I would get in touch with other client developers and start talking about a way to do what Twitter does but that doesn’t require Twitter itself (or any specific company or service).

He even gives an example of how this can work.

I always thought Twitter would become an underpinning of the web; a communication system that people and apps would use whether they knew it or not. What I hadn’t considered is that this is like asking cable providers to provide me with internet access but no content. They don’t want to become a dumb pipe. There is very little money in that.

Developers of Twitter clients are in direct competition with one another. Which leads to the key question in my mind: can these competing developers find a way to combine forces against their common enemy to solve this problem?

If a system like Brent describes is created and if Twitter continues down this road, I will use it.

Posted on July 2, 2012, in Life. Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on Replacing Twitter.